Accessibilty module for colorblind people

[Daniel Ruoso <daniel ruoso com>]

Hi,

I am colorblind. This problem doesn't cause much trouble, so it's not
something that really makes the computer useless without an
accessibility software. It would be better if everyone could take that
into consideration before drawing a chart, but unfortunally that isn't
always true. Sometimes a chart uses brown-green, purple-blue
combinations which are just useless for my type of colorblindness.

Here is my plan so far:

1) Create a library with a set of predefined color filters usefull for
colorblinds, for instance:
 * selective red saturation:
   This would take colors where red is one of the dominants (except 
   gray) and would saturate it to the maximum. So people with problem in
   the red cones can differentiate brown from red and purple from blue.
   Example: #555500 becomes #FF5500.
 * selective red dessaturation:
   This is the inverse of the above.
   Example: #555500 becomes #005500.
 * Hue shift
   This would displace the hue, preserving saturation and value.
   Example: #555500 becomes #005555.
 * monocrome
   This would take a base color and turn all the others to greyscale.

2) Integrate it with the desktop in a way that I press a keystroke and
activate my default filter with the default settings. Or use a window
button (at the side of minimize, for instance) to get to a filters menu
where I can activate any other filter at any time in any window.

This way, when seeing a chart with dubious colors I could just press the
keystroke to read the chart and then press the keystroke again to
continue using the software (or continue to using it with the filter
active).

3) Have a accessibility configuration which would perform the ishihara
test for those who doesn't know which time of colorblindness they have
indicating what filter would be the most usefull in most cases (for
example, the selective red saturation for mine colorblindness but
probably selective green saturation for other type and so on).

Here is what I did so far:

For now I have the base library (still not in some public place just
because I still didn't found one. But the license will be public
domain.). I already have 3 functional filters.

The library is being developed in C using test-driven-development. And
the basic idea is that it takes a xlib XColor compatible pointer, see if
it needs to be changed and then change it returning if the color has or
has not been changed.

So, what do others think about the idea?

Which is the better way to integrate this into metacity and gnome?

I was thinking composite management could help, but I'm not sure.

Well, this is just a kick-off. If someone could offer some place to host
the sources, nice (I just didn't want to start yet another project in
sourceforge...)

Thanks in advance,

Daniel Ruoso

P.S.: Please include-me in replies, I'm not subscribed.